Iakov Kachura

Born Oct. 28 (Nov. 9), 1897, in the village of Iurkovka, in present-day Tul’chin Raion, Vinnitsa Oblast; died in 1943. Soviet Ukrainian writer. Participant in World War I and the Great Patriotic War.

Upon graduating from the Kiev Institute of Public Education in 1925, Kachura became a village schoolteacher. His first work was published in 1923. The collections of stories Chronicle of a Collective (1925) and Without Bread (1927) were followed by the novels The Broken Oath and Intoxication (both 1928), dealing with the Civil War, and Ol’ga (1931), depicting the life of miners. The historical novella Ivan Bogun (1940; Russian translation, 1941) is devoted to the Ukrainian people’s war of liberation of 1648–54. His last collection, Happiness (1940), describes life on a collective farm. Kachura was taken prisoner in May 1942 and died in a fascist concentration camp.